Good, now that you have read this, I’m beginning to think we should all take a deep breath and maybe begin to frame up or organize discussions like this around themes our business partners understand – e.g. translating our findings for example across the five (and only five) essentials in business that matter; cash flow, profitability, velocity, growth, and customer intimacy. This theme can be extended to the non-profit or government world by simply substituting the word outcome for profitability. I guess what I’m driving at is a way to simplify our thinking and share what we are really doing in terms (lexicon) most of our customers and management can understand. An additional perspective can be introduced here as well by using business intelligence to answer the important and urgent questions. For example I would want to know:

Are we doing the right things?

Uncover where the significant dollars are; Are they really in layoffs or outsourcing?

Manage operational costs so that are directly tied to volume; You should only pay for what you are using, right?

Are we realizing the benefits?

Why “financial re-engineering” may be the worst thing you can trust in for use in your decisions

Discover and measure the real value of producing profitable, sustained business

Are we doing them the right way?

Uncover the power of cycle compression and really do more with less

How to produce higher quality products and services in our work products

Why shared information is more accurate, timely, complete, and less expensive

Are we getting them done well?

How to drive costs (not merely shift them) from the business

Why your most valuable resources may not be focused on the highest value opportunities

Not sure I can even begin to answer questions like this without a good clean source of reliable data I can use in a business intelligence application. Of course, I can always guess or do what many of my potential customers will do – go with their gut feel (many of them are usually right, much like the broken watch that is correct twice a day <g>).

Have to compliment Zillow (http://www.zillow.com/) on a terrific job and example we can all learn from with their Zillow Real Estate Market Reports for US Home – Values Fourth Quarter: October-December 2008. Visually appealing, intuitive, and just the right amount of graphical interest I believe this represents a truly useful example of an effective analytic application. Combining the geography and value trends in an interactive “heat map” like this is, well brilliant. Data values can accessed for the nation and 161 MSAs by clicking on the Excel icon, or clicking a graph for a collection of maps suitable for printing. Even the Excel download includes more than just data – a glossary of metadata defining the columns with active links to each tab. Well done, exceptional value, this is a terrific example of effectively conveying a wealth of information (not just data) in a way that is immediately useful.